So we're at a new decade. Are the robot lawyers here yet? When are they coming? My mental picture of C3PO projecting a hologram of a case file has not yet come true, and I must confess that I'm a bit disappointed.

OK, I know that's not what artificial intelligence is all about. In the past decade, we have seen AI's legal applications grow from primarily technology-assisted review in e-discovery to encompass everything from legal research to document automation to transactional law. Even if there aren't robot lawyers, AI has begun to fundamentally change how lawyers across the country practice. And from the predictions below, it's clear that both attorneys and technologists alike expect more growth from here.

This is the fifth in a six-part series of 2020 predictions from Legaltech News. Last week, we ran experts' predictions for e-discovery, the CCPA, privacy and cybersecurity in 2020. Check back tomorrow for our predictions for other innovative technologies in 2020. The quotes below are in alphabetical order by name, and some have been edited for length.

Alex Babin, CEO, Zero: "The biggest gains from automating legal practices will be time saved and improved workflow efficiencies as the AI 'takes over' more laborious tasks including litigation support, email, e-discovery, and the use of databases for case management. Lawyers will begin to trust in this process, letting AI perform these basic tasks such as auto-filing documents and email for compliance. AI will enhance corporate and regulatory reporting and improve contract creation and management."

Dan Broderick, co-founder and CEO, BlackBoiler: "In 2020, legal departments will continue to look for ways to create new efficiencies. Going after 'low hanging fruit' will continue to be a priority for organizations that stand to gain the most from eliminating redundancies and improve processes. New tech tools that are embedded in a lawyer's existing workflow will have the greatest amount of success in solving old problems, like contract negotiation. We will see AI help improve age-old, costly inefficiencies and open up new opportunities for lawyers to bring more value to their organizations and their clients."

Cat Casey, chief innovation officer, DISCO: "2020 will be the year that true AI enters the legal market, moving us beyond antiquated 50 year old machine learning methodologies and into application of outcome predicting software, model sharing across data sets and work product generation. I believe 2020 is the year we move from AI hype to AI in practice."

Patrick Basinski, counsel, Davis Wright Tremaine: "The appetite of businesses for AI solutions—especially those offering business or industrial process improvements—will continue to accelerate, in part thanks to the ease of transacting on SaaS-like contracts. On the other hand, there will be challenges to commercial adoption of emerging AI solutions focused on deeper analysis that require more time and effort to deliver impact. These two factors suggest that the largest cloud platform providers will continue to expand their portfolios of transactional AI offerings while looking to partner up with smaller companies and lawyers that can provide needed experience to support the application of emerging AI to specific customer scenarios."

Scott Forman, shareholder, Littler Mendelson and founder of Littler CaseSmart and Littler onDemand: "Data analytics and AI have already fundamentally changed the delivery of legal services, but I expect 2020 to bring a greater understanding of how these technologies enhance, rather than overtake, the work of lawyers. While robots and technology will never replace lawyers, they provide data and insight enabling lawyers to do their jobs faster and better. This includes automating aspects of the legal process—so that lawyers can focus on top-of-the-pyramid work—as well as synthesizing and serving up information that guides litigation strategy, identifies potential areas of risk and moves toward predicting legal outcomes."

Dean Harvey, co-chair of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Robotics practice, Perkins Coie: "Difficulties in accessing data will continue to stymie potential AI innovation at mid-sized to large companies. High profile instances of biased AI solutions (due to biased data sets) will increase, particularly in employment, insurance and credit. AI startups will be targeted for hacks due to their access to valuable data and their sometimes immature security practices. At least one jurisdiction will regulate the development of AI. In an area of progress, fully autonomous vehicles will put into use in a major metropolitan area, and autonomous vehicles will see wide spread adoption for hub and spoke deliveries but not for last mile deliveries."

Jose Lazares, VP, product strategy and business development, Intapp: "Firms will shift focus from lawyer efficiency to firm automation by leveraging NLP classification and predictive learning algorithms to drive down client/matter support costs by 50% or more. Examples include conflicts clearance, automated billing compliance and matter delivery optimization."

Douglas E. Mirell, partner, Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger: "I predict in the coming election year, the emergence of highly sophisticated 'deepfake' technology—employing artificial intelligence to generate doctored video content which appears realistic—will be weaponized to create phony campaign attack ads that will have gone viral before anyone recognizes their deceptiveness. By using candidates' own images and voices, ultra-sophisticated 'deepfakes' make that phenomenon more alarming than ever."

Maureen Mohlenkamp, principal, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory: "AI use will continue to expand in 2020, driving legal teams—particularly those managing ethics and compliance programs—to ensure ethical frameworks are in place early and used consistently to reduce algorithm bias and scale governance as programs evolve."

Jonah Paransky, executive VP and general manager, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions: "Legal and claims teams that have been dabbling in machine learning and artificial intelligence will fully realize the possibilities of these technologies to help make accurate predictions of future outcomes including improving budget estimates, assigning the most appropriate counsel, predicting outcomes, and more. All of this will make their operations more efficient and build stronger relationships between organizations and their law firm partners."

Chris Ricciuti, VP, product management for legal and compliance, Veritone: "Over the next year, artificial intelligence will continue to augment—not replace—humans in various business processes within the legal industry. AI will take over manually-intensive tasks like transcription and much of the e-discovery process. This will allow humans to focus on strategic tasks where they can really add value, like reviewing transcribed documents and relevant structured data and materials surfaced during e-discovery. This tracks closely back to the rest of the business world, where 95% of enterprise applications will have embedded AI in some capacity by 2025."

Matt Savare, partner, Lowenstein Sandler: "From massive data breaches to the increased use of secret algorithms driving many decisions to the rise of deepfakes to the weaponization of data for political purposes, transparency and traceability will capture the cultural and political zeitgeist. We're already seeing this trend with laws such as the GDPR and CCPA and various proposed laws regarding bias in artificial intelligence. The conversation regarding data will move from one focused primarily on security to one focused on ownership, fairness, and trust. As blockchain technology becomes more mature, efficient, interoperable, and scalable, it will be employed more broadly to address these important issues."

David Shonka, partner, Redgrave: "In 2020 the legal profession must come to grips with the reliability of AI when it is used to determine human rights. As discovery lawyers know, AI can assess the relevance of millions of documents for discovery purposes, but how well it does depends on the competence of the person who writes the algorithms, the quality of the information fed into it, the skill of the person who operates it, and, above all else, the still-unproven science that underlies it. The question is whether the lawyers and the courts are ready to evaluate AI when it is used to determine, not the relevance of documents, but the rights of a family to keep their children, the rights of a defendant to be released on bail, or the rights of a person to hold a job."

Serena Wellen, senior director, LexisNexis: "As the amount of legal data grows, legal research will continue to evolve with the infusion of AI, analytics and visualization tools to handle 'machine scale' tasks. AI will become critical to improve the speed and relevance of results, but also the efficiency and workflow of its users. Legal chatbots will engage users in question-answer dialogues to better refine searches, deliver more specific, succinct answers and "learn" from the behaviors of its users. As it learns, AI chatbots will become more adept at recommending search terms, similar topics, cases and other relevant info, thus maximizing the output of its users."